Watching
Suzanne

Julian Opie’s Watching Suzanne series shows a set of 20 prints featuring a dramatically cropped image of a woman’s torso and thighs, wearing only her underwear. The series is depicted exclusively in black and white and with very thick lines.

In cropping out the figure’s arms and lower half of her legs, Opie creates a highly abstracted image of the human form. Despite the flattened picture plane and use of thick, graphic lines, the image exudes a sense of realism in the way it captures the human body and thus provokes a bodily response from the viewer. Opie’s effectiveness in depicting the human form mixed with his strong sense of line, and bold use of simplified shapes is indicative of the way he strikes a balance between graphic design and high art.

Each print in Opie’s Watching Suzanne series shows the model in a dynamic pose, but when considered alongside one another the viewer can see that figure’s body in movement, turning away from the spectator. As with much of Opie’s work, each print exudes a sense of movement and motion through the static image, capturing the idea of time itself. The figure’s pose changes with each print as the series progresses and movement is conveyed through sequential images, much like movement in films. The intense cropping of each print also alludes to this notion of a snapshot in time, as opposed to providing the viewer with the entire storyline in one image.

For Opie, the depiction of movement itself becomes a tool to create a sense of realism within a highly structured, graphic visual language. Interested in movement as means to differentiate between people and form personalities, Opie uses this as a way to strike the balance between stylisation and realism in his works.

Opie has created these images through using digital photography and computer drawing programmes, a creative process he is well versed in and renowned for. Initially Opie captures the sitters through digital photographs so as to get a feel for their personality and point to any crucial details that are integral to their character. He then chooses his favourite images and draws over the individual photographs on the computer to reduce and abstract the original image.